If you don’t have one, then you’re losing out on customers – big time.

One of the biggest challenges for many small businesses is keeping their website up to date, without having to pay a web designer hundreds or thousands of dollars for every minor change required.

This is why WordPress is awesome.

It gives you more control over your own website and the content you publish.

But Why WordPress?

WordPress has fast become the defacto standard content management system for websites on the internet. It was originally designed as a blogging platform, but has transformed into an extremely flexible, robust and easy-to-use website building tool.

WPRocket – the best caching plugin on the market – great for speeding up your site.

More below (read on)

4. The Gravity Forms Plugin

Gravity Forms is one of the best plugins on WordPress and a reason in itself to use WordPress.

You can create an unlimited number of forms on your site, and you can even turn them into payment gateways by using the huge selection of Gravity Forms plugin extensions.

For one my local basketball club, Norwood Flames, we build a custom ‘pay fees’ section using Gravity forms and EWAY to take all of the fees online.

5. Easily Upload Files / Images

Uploading files, images and other attachments is extremely easy with WordPress.

The drop and drag functionality makes the uploading of images to a page or blog post a very simple task.

6. Blog Functionality Built In

WordPress was originally designed as an blogging platform and it’s native blog functionality is the best in the business, allowing your business to create and maintain a robust and feature rich blog with ease.

Yoast gives you the ability to control each individual on-page SEO elements including:

Page titles

Meta descriptions

No index certain pages

301 redirects

htaccess file

Breadcrumbs

XML sitemaps

Robots.txt

Canonical

Clean up header

8. Forums, Guides and Support

If you are having an issue with your website, chances are someone else has too and have written a blog post about it, or commented in a WordPress forum.

A quick google search should uncover the answer to just about any of your WordPress problems.

And if you get stuck, you can post a job of Elance or oDesk to get some help.

If you’re not happy with your current website developer, you can easily get someone else to take over so you’re not limited by what can be done!

9. Managed Support Services

There have been some amazing services pop up recently who are designed to help manage your WordPress website, keep it updated and secure.

Check out Wpcurve who describe themselves as a company that: “…empowers business owners to build their business without worrying about WordPress. You get 24 / 7 access to the world’s best developers for maintenance, support & small jobs.”

Services like WPCurve could make your life a lot easier when it comes to managing and maintaining your business website.

10. You’re Not Married to One Website Designer

The beauty of using the most popular content management systems is that you’re not locked into one website designer or developer who can make changes on your site.

No ‘custom CMS fees’, no ‘bespoke system’, and no lock in contracts.

All you need is access to your WordPress backend and to your FTP server, and you can have anybody develop for your website.

There’s dozens of websites full of freelancers and outsourcing companies with the skills to make the changes to the WordPress website you want – and usually at a very attractive price.

11. Visual Composer

One of my favourite additions to theme builders is the WordPress Visual Composer plugin, which has added drag and drop functionality to building a page’s layout.

We’ve used this plugin in the creation of a number of WordPress websites, and the drag and drop functionality is efficient to use and eliminates the need to remember the shortcodes associated with the theme.

12. Security

WordPress’ security out of the box in my opinion, one of WordPress’ biggest weaknesses as it requires a number of plugins and alterations to ‘harden’ an initial WordPress installation.

As the number of people and businesses using WordPress increases, the more incentive hackers have to target that particular platform.

This is why keeping your WordPress plugins and versions constantly updated, and monitoring their performance is vital to the health of your website.

We recommend our clients have a Sucuri Security subscription (or similar service), in combination with the following plugins, to obtain a higher level of WordPress security:

13. Online Store Integration

Woocommerce is a robust E-Commerce plugin that immediately turns any WordPress installation into a online store.

And according to them, “WooCommerce powers 24% of all eCommerce websites, that’s more than 663,153 websites!”

There are hundreds of WooCommerce based WordPress themes, and ‘Woocommerce friendly’ themes that work seamlessly with this plugin allowing you to start selling your products and services through your website.

WooCommerce Features:

Payments

Shipping

Inventory management

Reporting

Marketing

Tax

Extensions

WooCommerce is continuing to grow at a rapid rate, they even now have their own line of plugins and extensions to further extend the functionality of anyone using this awesome online store plugin.

14. It’s Easy To Change Designs, Without Losing Rankings or All Your Data

A major issue when creating a new website for small businesses is the loss of old rankings, and needing to put 301 redirects in place to redirect old content to the corresponding new version of the new site.

The benefit of using Wordpress is the ability to easily export your entire website; including pages, posts, media, permalinks, users and theme options by utilising the import/export functionality.

Once you’ve exported, you can easily import your entire WordPress data into a new WordPress installation on a staging server or another domain name, which means you don’t have to manually input all your data when changing designs, templates or themes.

By retaining your existing permalinks and page structure on a new design/domain name will mean you won’t lose any rankings as a result of using new URL’s generated by a different content management system.

15. Mobile friendly

Most of the best WordPress themes are quite mobile friendly out of the box, which is important for your website’s usability.

Responsive sites are typically a sound option for a smaller local business as opposed to a full dedicated mobile website, and the selection of the right WordPress theme will eliminate the need to get a mobile website altogether.

16. WordPress keeps getting better

WordPress is constantly being worked on and updated by the massive WordPress community, and the hundreds of dedicated WordPress developers.

New features, functionality, plugins and security updates are being rolled out daily which means your WordPress website can continue to improve over time, and stay up to date with latest changes in technology.

Super Admin – somebody with access to the site network administration features and all other features.

Administrator – somebody who has access to all the administration features within a single site.

Editor – somebody who can publish and manage posts including the posts of other users.

Author – somebody who can publish and manage their own posts.

Contributor – somebody who can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them.

Subscriber – somebody who can only manage their profile.

19. It’s FREE

WordPress is a 100% open source a free content management system which means there are no ongoing licence fees for using the platform!

This means you’re not going to constantly be charged every time you want to make a change to your site, or upgrade to the latest version of the WordPress platform or update any of your plugins.

20. Membership Services

As a part of your website, you may require the ability to provide different levels of access to your clients, or to people with different levels of subscription.

Fortunately, WordPress has some exceptional plugins that can create a protected membership area in just a few clicks of the mouse.

For example, the Wishlist membership plugin can turn your WordPress website into a full-blown membership site complete with protected, members-only content, integrated payments, member management – in just a few seconds!

21. Forums

Your website may need a forum or help centre where you can discuss how to use your products or services with your customers (or potential customers).

Luckily, WordPress has created forum software designed to easily setup discussion forums inside your website which makes setting up your own forum, a very simple process!

22. Easy to Integrate with your CRM of Choice

As your business grows, the need for a CRM and integrated marketing platform grows as well.

Most of the popular CRM’s on the marketintegrate seamlessly with WordPress including Infusionsoft, Zoho and Salesforce (just to name a few).

23. Cost Savings

Having a WordPress website can help eliminate many of the costs that website designers typically charge you for.

A couple of small changes to your website each month can cost several hundred dollars, so learning to manage your own content and make minor changes yourself, can significantly reduce your outlay.

Having built in visual composer and other plugins make it a lot easier for you to update and manage your own content. There is a small learning curve – but it pays off in the long run if you can create your own pages and make small cosmetic changes to the site without having to involve your website designer.

Also, having the ability to add plugins to improve your website and extend it’s functionality for free, can significantly reduce your overall expenditure on your website!

Summary

All local businesses should have a website – and the best platform in the game is WordPress.

That’s not to say there aren’t other excellent content management platforms out there, but for a local business looking to get the best ‘bang for buck’, WordPress is hands down the best choice.

WordPress can save you a lot of time and money, and is well worth the investment in the long run!

Have you recently switched over to WordPress from another CMS?

Let us know how it went and whether you would recommend switching websites over to WordPress.